


Grafted

by Donotquestionme



Category: Trollhunters (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Post S3, Season 3 Spoilers, fluffy with a hint of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-15 21:05:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14797949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donotquestionme/pseuds/Donotquestionme
Summary: A short drabble I threw together in under an hour basically just to share a headcanon.Barbara and Walter discuss his cape.





	Grafted

“Walter?” Barbara asked.

“Hmm?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.” Strickler replied.

“How do you fit your wings under that tiny cape?”

“Huh? Oh!” Strickler laughed. “I don’t.”

He pulled the side of his cape up to prove his point. No wings hid beneath it.

“I couldn’t possibly fit them beneath this tiny thing,” he chuckled.

“Wait, so…you don’t always have them?”

“Certainly not. Far too unwieldly to have around all the time.”

“But…then you just…grow them?”

“Ah, no,” Strickler said, pausing to think of how to best explain. “My troll form, and my wings along with it, are sort of…always, what I am. My human form is a sort of…glamour I suppose?”

“But, then shouldn’t I be able to feel your troll form when I touch you in human form, if it’s an illusion?” Barbara asked.

“Not quite an ‘illusion’, the normal sense of the word. More along the lines of…a slight…distortion of reality. I can control, to some extent, how much of a distortion it is. How much of the ‘real’ me I display to the world at any time.”

“What about your clothes, then? What happens to them when you change? Are they…real?”

“Real. Rest assured, my dear, I am quite clothed. They are simply…hm…stored? Stored is a good word I suppose. In a sort of extra dimensional place depending on which I choose to don. It doesn’t necessary have to do with my form itself. I could just as easily do this:” A flash of green light dimmed to show him, in troll form, in his human outfit. “As this:” Another flash and he was back in his normal cloak.”

“So, could you just store your whole wardrobe in there and change clothes at will?”

Strickler chuckled again.

“I’m afraid my control over that is limited to about the one outfit I wear in each form. Perhaps Otto could have accomplished something along those lines, but it’s beyond by ability.”

Barbara pondered everything she’d been told for a moment.

“But…if not to hide your wings, why wear a cloak at all?” she asked at last. “It’s not as though you’re shy about being shirtless.”

Strickler coughed, embarrassed.

“I’d just feel a bit naked without anything, I suppose. Besides I like the knives.” he said, smirking.

Then the smirk faded.

“That was a lie,” he said, seemingly less to Barbara and more to himself. “I lied to you just then. I do that a lot, I’ve noticed. It’s somewhat compulsive, I suppose. It’s never behooved me not to lie. It’s part of my nature…” he trailed off.

“I…don’t want to lie to you,” Strickler said, after a moment. “An odd feeling, for me. Even more so I feel as though I’d like…to be truthful with you. A terribly dangerous way to feel for a…being such as me. And yet…I mean, it wasn’t entirely a lie. It had its seeds in truth. All the best lies do, I suppose…”

Strickler couldn’t seem to help the words spilling out of his mouth. Everything he said was always planned, always calculated. Always formal and practiced and perfect. Yet, in speaking his actual feelings, and especially to Barbara, he found that words simply tumbled from him much without regard to the rigorous standard of articulation he usually held them to.

Thankfully, Barbara cut him off before he rambled anymore.

“What was the lie?” she asked.

“That that’s the reason I always wear a cloak,” Strickler said. “As I said, I suppose that is, in part the truth but truly I…don’t want anyone to see what’s beneath it.”

“But…you said your wings weren’t there unless you wanted them to be.”

Strickler smiled sadly.

“They are and they aren’t. It’s…nothing I’ve…ever discussed with anyone…”

“And you never have to,” Barbara said. “I wouldn’t ask you to.”

“But I…I want you to know,” Stickler said, amazed at his own words, and even more amazed that they were true. “I want you to see. I want you to…know  _me._ ”

He chuckled at the preposterousness of it.

“’Me’. What a ridiculous concept. And yet I find myself saying it with utter sincerity.”

He laced his fingers together, nervously.  Taking a steadying breath, he turned around. In another flash of green, his cloak disappeared, leaving his back bare.

He couldn’t see Barbara’s face, but he heard her gasp. He winced.

“Walter…what is this?” she asked, sounding horrified. And why wouldn’t she be, at seeing the extent of the aberration that was his existence?

“Stalklings,” Strickler said. “They’re a kind of winged troll. Vicious, powerful, and immune to sunlight to boot. Unfortunately, not all that good at stealth. But, when combined (quite literally, he added in his mind, darkly) with the shapeshifting abilities of a changeling…”

Strickler jumped suddenly when he felt a hand against his back. Running over the edges where one type of stone blended into the other.

“…how?”

“Grafting, they called it,” Strickler explained. “Breaking off the stone of one troll and implanting it into the still growing stone of a youngling.”

He felt Barbara’s hands continue to explore his back. He knew what she saw, though he actively avoided looking at it himself. Two, ragged, greyish black hunks of stone, forced into his stone skin on either side of his spine, and a jumbled smattering of fracture lines and creeping veins where the two ores had fought each other’s presence before finally admitting a truce.

“It was some of the Gumm Gumm’s earlier, more experimental work. Many young changelings either shattered during the grafting process itself or broke apart as the two types of stone rejected each other. I am one of the very few who survive to this day.”

“Walter…I…” Barbara began.

Strickler didn’t quite know why he was bracing himself. It’s not like, at this point, he was still hoping she wouldn’t find any part of him revolting. He’d long given up the hope anyone would.

“Walter I’m so sorry.”

Strickler blinked. He turned around to face her and was shocked to see tears in her eyes.

“Sorry?” Strickler parroted, dumbfounded. “Whatever for?”

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” Barbara said. “Everything I’d heard about what they did to changelings is so awful and now  _this._  I just…I feel so terrible for you.”

“For…me?”

“Of course, how could I not?”

That gave Strickler pause.

“You’re not…revolted?” he asked.

“Of course, I am!” Barbara said, then quickly corrected herself when she saw Strickler wince ever so slightly. “Not by  _you!_ By what you had to endure! By what was  _done_ to you. As beautiful as it looks now, it was wrong.”

Strickler seemed to forget how to breath for a moment.

“B- _beautiful?_ ” he choked. “You can’t be serious. This is…a deformity! A defect! An…impurity.”

“Sometimes things that are impure…are the most beautiful things of all. I mean…you…are anyway…” Barbara seemed to stumble. “Heh,” she laughed. “I’m not as good at this smooth-talking thing as you are.”

“And a blessing that is,” Strickler breathed.

Barbara gave him a questioning look.

“If it were any other case…I wouldn’t possibly be able to believe you.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is what it is. The idea I wanted to share was that Strickler can control whether his wings are out or not and also that his wings come from the fact that he was combined with a Stalkling during the process that turned him into a changeling. I kind of just gave up at the end because it was late and I wanted it to be done.


End file.
